People and the Sky

People and the Sky PDF Author: Anthony Aveni
Publisher: Thames and Hudson
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"Anthony Aveni reveals how !Kung and Mursi hunter-gatherers depended on signals in the sky for their survival and sustenance; how Polynesian sailors navigated a seemingly limitless watery world by star bearings; how social cohesion in cultures as diverse as the Pawnee and the Inca was mirrored in celestial imagery; and how the cosmic connection between the arrangement of Chinese and Aztec cities and the constellations served as an expression of political authority." "For most of human history, people found meaning in the dance of the cosmic denizens. Today, many aspects of this intimate contact between daily life and what happens in the sky have disappeared. Did our ancestors have an understanding of the cosmos that we ourselves lack? How and why did it all happen? These are the questions addressed in this engaging and erudite book."--BOOK JACKET.

People and the Sky

People and the Sky PDF Author: Anthony Aveni
Publisher: Thames and Hudson
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"Anthony Aveni reveals how !Kung and Mursi hunter-gatherers depended on signals in the sky for their survival and sustenance; how Polynesian sailors navigated a seemingly limitless watery world by star bearings; how social cohesion in cultures as diverse as the Pawnee and the Inca was mirrored in celestial imagery; and how the cosmic connection between the arrangement of Chinese and Aztec cities and the constellations served as an expression of political authority." "For most of human history, people found meaning in the dance of the cosmic denizens. Today, many aspects of this intimate contact between daily life and what happens in the sky have disappeared. Did our ancestors have an understanding of the cosmos that we ourselves lack? How and why did it all happen? These are the questions addressed in this engaging and erudite book."--BOOK JACKET.

The Sky People

The Sky People PDF Author: S.M. Stirling
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1429987472
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Marc Vitrac was born in Louisiana in the early 1960's, about the time the first interplanetary probes delivered the news that Mars and Venus were teeming with life—even human life. At that point, the "Space Race" became the central preoccupation of the great powers of the world. Now, in 1988, Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the US-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers. But there are flies in this ointment – and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus's life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc's Cajun charm. Meanwhile, at the western end of the continent, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People leads her tribe in a conflict with the Neanderthal-like beastmen who have seized her folk's sacred caves. Then an EastBloc shuttle crashes nearby, and the beastmen acquire new knowledge... and AK47's. Jamestown sends its long-range blimp to rescue the downed EastBloc cosmonauts, little suspecting that the answer to the jungle planet's mysteries may lie there, among tribal conflicts and traces of a power that made Earth's vaunted science seem as primitive as the tribesfolk's blowguns. As if that weren't enough, there's an enemy agent on board the airship... Extravagant and effervescent, The Sky People is alternate-history SF adventure at its best. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

People of the Sky

People of the Sky PDF Author: Clare Bell
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497614686
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
“An entrancing, occasionally erotic novel of clashing cultures and alien biology” from the author of Ratha’s Creature, an ALA Best Book (Locus). Old technology survives and even thrives on the challenges of a new planet populated by ancient human spirits. Kesbe Temiya, a freelance flyer, accepts a commission to deliver an ancient but restored C‐47 (a Gooney Bird, in twentieth century parlance, named The Gooney Berg by its new owner) to a collector of rare aircraft on the planet Oneway. Dropped off by a starship, Temiya gets sidetracked by bad weather, rescued by a mysterious figure riding an alien flying creature, and stranded in a long‐vanished Pueblo Indian colony that follows the prophecy of the Blue Star Kachina and lives the old ways, isolated from technology and away from the white man. Despite her own Pueblo blood, Kesbe is an outsider; only by adopting the ways of the People of the Sky, including a ritual that may turn her, too, into a throwback and could even kill her, can she find the help she needs to fulfill her mission—and find the life that is right for her.

Sky People

Sky People PDF Author: Ardy Sixkiller Clarke
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1601634145
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, author of Encounters With Star People, vowed as a teenager to follow in the footsteps of two 19th-century explorers, John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who brought the ancient Maya cities to the world’s attention. Dr. Clarke set out on a seven-year adventure (from 2003 through 2010) through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, collecting stories of encounters, sky gods, giants, little people, and aliens among the indigenous people. She drove more than 12,000 miles, visiting 89 archaeological sites (Stephens and Catherwood visited only 44) and conducting nearly 100 individual interviews. The result is an enthralling series of unique, original, true stories of encounters with space travelers, giants, little people, and UFOs. Sky People may very well change the way you perceive and experience the world.

Soul of the Sky

Soul of the Sky PDF Author: Dave Thurlow
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This is a different kind of weather book. "Soul of the Sky" is not preoccupied with charting fronts, defining what an isobar is, or trying to get you to memorize the conversion formula from degrees Centigrade to degrees Fahrenheit. It is a collection of essays that illustrate how the weather can inspire, terrify, connect us and urge us on to new adventures, and invite us to gain a deeper appreciation of how weather and climate affect our everyday lives. Each essay is built around a personal moment of terror, appreciation, or epiphany: a storm on an exposed mountain ridge that tested a mother's ability to care for her children; a savage tornado that forced an obsessed storm chaser to quetion the nature of his pursuit; a drought that parched the hopes of a small farming community in rural Georgia. The essays here deal with every kind of weather our climate dishes out, yet they are linked by the fact that a first-rate writer was on the scene to experience, and record, the weather event. They provide clear, accessible and detailed answers to scores of meteorological mysteries. The result is a fascinating blend of science and adventure -- a blend that will appeal to a huge spectrum of readers.

Sky People

Sky People PDF Author: Patricia Grace
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
ISBN: 1742288189
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
In this collection of Patricia Grace's stories we meet the sky people, those under the guardianship of Ranginui and Sky Parent, who are the unwanted, the dispossessed, the wounded in love. But shining through even the darkest human condition is the light to which sky people everywhere aspire. To love and in turn be loved; to create and to belong; even, perhaps, to fly. Also available as an eBook

The Sky People

The Sky People PDF Author: John Emery
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : CHR 1988
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
When Australia took over the administration of northern New Guinea after World War I, volunteers, adventurers, and dilettantes went to the tropical purgatory to police and explore. Their meeting, one of two totally opposite civilizations, is the basis for this story.

Under a White Sky

Under a White Sky PDF Author: Elizabeth Kolbert
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0593136284
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times With a new afterword by the author That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

When They Severed Earth from Sky

When They Severed Earth from Sky PDF Author: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842867
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years. We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions. Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling.

Night Sky

Night Sky PDF Author: Jonathan Poppele
Publisher: Adventure Publications
ISBN: 1591936144
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
Stargazing is among the most peaceful and inspiring outdoor activities. Night Sky, the award-winning book by Jonathan Poppele, makes it more fun than ever! Take a simple approach to finding 62 constellations by focusing on one constellation at a time, instead of attempting to study dizzying charts. Start with the easy-to-find constellations during each season and work toward the more difficult ones. Better yet, you'll learn how to locate any constellation in relation to the Big Dipper, the North Star and the top of the sky. With two ways to locate each constellation, you'll know where in the sky to look and what to look for! Along the way, you'll be introduced to mythology, facts and tidbits, as well as details about the planets, solar system and more! As an added bonus, the book comes with a red-light flashlight for night reading.